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Tuesday, January 15, 2013

People coming to Iquitos, Peru are
mostly unlikely to know the details of the city they see, tourists
especially, but also residents who focus on daily activities in their
own mileiux all of whom thus miss seeing the city for what it can be
to those with a basic understanding of its history and the vocabulary
to articulate their visual experiences. Take the example of
architecture, the built environment that is, effectively, the city,
and of which only but a tiny minority of people are acutely aware as
a distinct and also contingent reality in which the person exists.
Truly, only the few of the city know the nature of the built
environment analogously to the knowledge of the curandero in
the selva. One might know the names of building like the
villager knows the names of plants, and one might know the contents
of a building's wares in the way a villager knows the medicinal or
nutritional values of plants; but there is the deeper level of
knowledge of the environment, natural or man-made, that reveals
mysteries and wonder to the man who examines with care and interest.
One can know more about ones place, and one can thus be in closer
contact with ones life as authentic facet of that environment,
perhaps gaining an affinity with the environment that is not even
suspected among the uninitiated, when one is articulate and informed
about the deep nature of ones own space, both private and shared. For
the general tourist this grasp of the city is unlikely at a glance;
and for the unattuned resident it is probably not assumed as
possible. One is thus alienated from ones place, a mere atomic being
without solidarity or a further sense of the matrix of ones life.
Even a casual study of a few built spaces can awaken the wonder of a
place to the otherwise occluded mind. Suddenly, with even a small
amount of knowledge about the possibilities of knowledge of ones
place, one can see, perhaps for the first time, that the city is a
complex web of life and triumph of the mind for the good. Life in the
city, outwardly no different from sleep to epiphany, can be exciting.
“Look at that building. It's all about our time and our lives; how
we came to be where we are and whom!”

In one relatively short loop through
the city centre on foot one can see, probably for the first time, one
can see the city of Iquitos revealed as a place of high drama,
terrible beauty, unimaginable change in human history, the struggles
of Man against God, man against man, good for all, and the continuing
struggle to live, prosper, and procreate in peace and felicity.

Walking Tour One.

Beginning a short walk around the
centre of Iquitos, one might begin at the Plaza de Armas, seeing for
the first time the reason such a place has existed in cities since
the days of the Romans and why Iquitos has its own Plaza de Armas
rather than not. Turning slightly, one can see the struggles of the
Catholic Church against encroaching power from the bourgeois; and
next one sees the bourgeois triumph of man over nature in the form of
the Rubber Boom era edifices of, for example, the Iron House; and one
sees the triumph as well of man over man as grand commercial palaces
are brought low by the turning tides of the flow of gold, and one sees the tide
of time itself as one looks at the Pinasco Building now in its
dotage.

Looking at the Plaza de Armas one sees
quickly the central concerns of those past: the war against Chile as
illustrated at the Obelisk; the reaction of Catholicism against the
rise of commerce in the form of the Neo-Gothic cathedral; the
mechanisation of labour and life in the Iron Building; and the
decline of the city as the Rubber Boom collapsed, leaving the lives
of many to linger in poverty and decay till the city was reborn, the
evidence of past grand houses of the rich standing as testament to
the fall as Calle del Oro was eventually renamed Prospero, now
dominated by the government in the form of a massive and eclectic
building used to collect and file statistics, the INEI Building.

Such completes the first leg of a
journey of the mind through the city of Iquitos, the following three
stretches completing a short but illuminating tour of how it was, and
why, and why we are here today.

Havng stopped to look at and examine
buildings #239-243 and #225-231 Putumayo; #129 Prospero, Casa
Pinasco; and #201 Prospero, INEI Building; as well as the others
mentioned above, leaving the INEI Building, one can walk farther down
Prospero to see the history of the city as it remains today:

Sunday, January 13, 2013

The city of Iquitos, Peru has an
antiquated sewer system that doesn't serve the city well, the system
being installed piecemeal during the Rubber Boom years, c. 1880-1912;
and since then the city has grown from appr. 20,000 to nearly half a
million people. There are later private installations, of course, and
there are on-going civic upgrades as well; but there is, as of Jan.
2013, no systematic and all-encompassing sewerage system in Iquitos.
That is changing as we speak: Iquitos is on the verge of a new
horizon in sewers. The question is whether the new system will be
better than the old one.